All Chapters of Scent of Obsession : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Chapter 51: Vigil Liora's POV The waiting room emptied and filled and emptied again the way waiting rooms did at 3AM. People came in with fear on their faces and left with either relief or something worse and the fluorescent lights stayed constant through all of it, indifferent to what happened underneath them. Liora stayed in her chair. Margaret stayed in hers. They hadn't spoken since the introduction. Just sat across from each other in the silence of two people who had assessed the situation and decided that whatever needed to be said could wait until there was something to say it about. Liora had her hands in her lap. Margaret had hers folded precisely in her own. At 3AM a woman came through the waiting room doors with two children, a boy of maybe seven and a girl slightly younger, both of them in pajamas, both of them with the confused frightened faces of children woken from sleep and brought somewhere bright and unfamiliar. Behind them a man, he looked familiar. Her h

Chapter 51 Continued: RetributionLiora's POVMargaret came back from the corridor at 4:47AM.She sat down across from Liora with the same posture she'd arrived with and put her phone in her bag and folded her hands in her lap and looked at the window."Victor Lang is in police custody," she said.Liora looked at her."Since when," she said."A few hours ago after the collision." Margaret's voice was completely even. "There are fourteen cameras between the office building and the intersection. The truck was registered to a subsidiary company connected to Lang Enterprises at two degrees of separation." A pause. "Two degrees wasn't enough."Liora absorbed that."The police moved fast," she said carefully."The police had help moving fast," Margaret said.She said it the way she said everything. Flat and precise and entirely comfortable with what it meant.Liora looked at her.At the composed face and the folded hands and the woman who had arrived at a hospital at 2AM already several ste

Chapter 53: The Shape of Missing Damien's POV He knew his name. He knew his company. The deals he'd signed. The board members by name and disposition. The ones worth trusting and the ones worth watching. He knew Elena, his sister. That one came back sharp and complete and painful. The accident. The argument. The guilt that had apparently defined three years of his life before the one that put him here. He knew Victor Lang. Who had decided to end things and had ended Marcus instead and was now in a cell with problems multiplying around him. He knew his mother. Margaret came every morning at nine and sat in the chair and told him things he needed to know in the order she'd decided he needed to know them, direct, efficient and without filter, traits that were obvious he'd ingerited from her. He knew Elias Kane. His assistant. Two years. Competent. The kind of employee you built your operation around without acknowledging that was what you were doing. He knew all of it. The a

Chapter 55: The ReportMargaret's POVThe report arrived at seven forty three in the morning.Forty one pages.David had been thorough. He always was. It was why he'd been with her for so long and why she paid him what she paid him and why she'd called him specifically for this rather than anyone else.She sat at the desk in her study with her coffee and read every page.The surface things first.Liora Kane. Twenty six. Born in a small town outside Chicago. Relocated to New York at seventeen with her brother Elias following two years later. Two jobs since arriving. The bookstore on the east side and a waitressing position she'd dropped eight months ago.Clean financial history. Cash where possible. Nothing loud. Nothing that pointed anywhere deliberately.The academic record.Undergraduate biochemistry. Distinction. Postgraduate research in olfactory neuroscience. Three published papers before she disappeared from the academic record entirely.Margaret turned the page.The lab.Regist

Four Years Later The toddler's name was Zara. She had her mother's jaw and her father's eyes and absolutely nobody's patience for sitting still on a park bench when there were pigeons to chase and Liora had given up on the bench approximately four minutes ago and was standing with her hands in her jacket pockets watching her run across the grass with the focused intensity of someone who had decided the pigeons were going to be caught today regardless of their own opinions on the matter. "Zara," she called. "Don't go past the fountain." Zara looked back at her over her shoulder. Grey eyes. The same grey eyes that Liora had been looking at for four years without being able to look away from them and would probably be looking at for the rest of her life with the same complicated warmth. "Mama the birds," Zara said. Like this explained everything. "I see the birds," Liora said. "Don't go past the fountain." Zara considered this seriously. Then she turned back to the pig